MTG: How many cards to keep track of max? [No Elotars]

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 9:51 pm

I did some searches for research papers involving MtG, but almost everything was a bit too meta. Like, I shit you not, Markets, Morality & Magic: The Gathering: Insights from Collectible Card Games for Teaching Free-Market Political Economy. I just wanted game theory papers dudes! There were a couple tangentially related papers I stumbled on but they were dealing with complexity in games that weren't very similar at all.

elotar · Post by **elotar** » Mon Nov 19, 2018 9:54 am

Whipstitch wrote:I like how his argument is basically that you can have infinite space because everyone is going to netdeck super hard while the casuals eat shit.

This is the definition of MTG, right?

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Mon Nov 19, 2018 1:16 pm

elotar wrote:
Whipstitch wrote:I like how his argument is basically that you can have infinite space because everyone is going to netdeck super hard while the casuals eat shit.
This is the definition of MTG, right?

Elotar, I know you are new here so I will tell you that when a thread has a "No [UserName]" that person isn't allowed to continue posting in that thread.

elotar · Post by **elotar** » Tue Nov 20, 2018 10:15 am

Leress wrote:
elotar wrote:
Whipstitch wrote:I like how his argument is basically that you can have infinite space because everyone is going to netdeck super hard while the casuals eat shit.
This is the definition of MTG, right?
Elotar, I know you are new here so I will tell you that when a thread has a "No [UserName]" that person isn't allowed to continue posting in that thread.

Fuck, the Den is even more stupid than I thought.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri Nov 23, 2018 7:20 pm

erik wrote:I did some searches for research papers involving MtG, but almost everything was a bit too meta. Like, I shit you not, Markets, Morality & Magic: The Gathering: Insights from Collectible Card Games for Teaching Free-Market Political Economy. I just wanted game theory papers dudes! There were a couple tangentially related papers I stumbled on but they were dealing with complexity in games that weren't very similar at all.

There's...
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2010-05-03

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2011-12-19

Which is more big picture than specifically answering the topic of this thread.

A 2003 article on how keywords have been increasing:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2003-05-19

This is getting closer to the topic, as keywords are a way to memorize things which reoccur

Post by **fbmf** » Fri Nov 23, 2018 11:40 pm

elotar wrote:
Leress wrote:
elotar wrote:
This is the definition of MTG, right?
Elotar, I know you are new here so I will tell you that when a thread has a "No [UserName]" that person isn't allowed to continue posting in that thread.
Fuck, the Den is even more stupid than I thought.

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
I'm back from vacation. Sorry for the delay in responding. Elotar, Leress is correct about the forum rules. If that bothers you, there is no requirement that you stay and post.
[/TGFBS]

Count Arioch the 28th · Sat Nov 24, 2018 12:57 am

Whipstitch wrote:I like how his argument is basically that you can have infinite space because everyone is going to netdeck super hard while the casuals eat shit.

Not defending the other crap that dude was saying (as funny as I found his "there's nothing to keep track of because you're already keeping track of everything" argument), but isn't netdecking assumed? I mean, if I got back into magic I'd check out the top decks to see what the meta is. Unless you're at the bleeding edge it just seems like the thing to do, see what already works and what people better than you are doing.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sat Nov 24, 2018 1:31 am

Netdecking is assumed, yes, but much of what makes Magic actually enjoyable rather than just empty pantomime is that netdecking can be collaborative rather than just downloading a list and never thinking about it again. Or to put it another way, you want your game to be digestible enough that people can enjoy themselves before Mike Flores gets around to writing an article about how the smart people are playing.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Sat Nov 24, 2018 3:33 am

If I have mystruthers, I buy a box of Magic cards in the current set and draft with a friend with a couple of times. Following that we take ~15 packs and build a deck from that. Overall, that gives us a better sense of the cards and potentially allows us to find a deck that might have been missed. It certainly helps when a new series comes out to know cards that didn't have much value and suddenly do.

Count Arioch the 28th · Sat Nov 24, 2018 4:16 pm

Last time I did a draft with my friends it went poorly.

There was a guy in our group back then that was only there due standard geek social fallacies. Part of the deal was we were playing sort of a tournament where we all played everyone, and the winner got to win one card from your deck of their choice (we had all paid in for the cards so it was assumed we'd be taking home whatever we had left). I had the draft before he did and selected a card he really wanted so he was constantly telling me he was going to take that card. Like, constantly, every 5-10 minutes. Host ended up calling the game when everyone else wanted to kick the dude's ass and I ended up giving the deck I had to the host (I hadn't played for years, and it was his birthday).

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Sat Nov 24, 2018 5:28 pm

Last time I drafted was a couple of weeks ago. It was a repack draft with randomized Vanguard cards. It was pretty fun.

Count Arioch the 28th · Sun Nov 25, 2018 9:38 pm

I guess the takeaway is everything is better when you don't hang out with a-holes.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:58 am

deaddmwalking wrote:If I have mystruthers, I buy a box of Magic cards in the current set and draft with a friend with a couple of times. Following that we take ~15 packs and build a deck from that. Overall, that gives us a better sense of the cards and potentially allows us to find a deck that might have been missed. It certainly helps when a new series comes out to know cards that didn't have much value and suddenly do.

How many keywords does a set tend to have in MtG now?

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 5:58 am

OgreBattle wrote:
deaddmwalking wrote:If I have mystruthers, I buy a box of Magic cards in the current set and draft with a friend with a couple of times. Following that we take ~15 packs and build a deck from that. Overall, that gives us a better sense of the cards and potentially allows us to find a deck that might have been missed. It certainly helps when a new series comes out to know cards that didn't have much value and suddenly do.
How many keywords does a set tend to have in MtG now?

Excluding evergreen ones, each set seems to add one or two. Guilds of Ravinca added 5, one for each guild. The next set will probably have 5 for the other guilds.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 9:09 am

Leress wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:
deaddmwalking wrote:If I have mystruthers, I buy a box of Magic cards in the current set and draft with a friend with a couple of times. Following that we take ~15 packs and build a deck from that. Overall, that gives us a better sense of the cards and potentially allows us to find a deck that might have been missed. It certainly helps when a new series comes out to know cards that didn't have much value and suddenly do.
How many keywords does a set tend to have in MtG now?
Excluding evergreen ones, each set seems to add one or two. Guilds of Ravinca added 5, one for each guild. The next set will probably have 5 for the other guilds.

Do they tend to use all 30something evergreen, or do they only use a specific amount?

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 1:58 pm

OgreBattle wrote:
Do they tend to use all 30something evergreen, or do they only use a specific amount?

https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Evergreen

I looked at a list, nearly all of them except for two.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 2:47 pm

A lot of the 'evergreen' keywords are very familiar. Things like 'flying' or 'reach' are relatively simple and only serve to establish attacking/blocking relationships and targets for some abilities (ie target creature with flying). Within a block, the featured ability tends to be repeated fairly often (like 'create a treasure artifact that can be sacrificed for 1 mana', or explore - 'reveal your top card and if it is a land card put it into your hand, if it is not you can discard to your graveyard or return to the top of your deck and you add a +1 counter to your creature). If an ability triggers when a creature is put into play (or removed from play) the ability tends to be easier to track and apply. The trouble is sometimes you opt to remove a creature from play that, due to their activated ability, you probably shouldn't.

Conditional abilities (like if a creature entered play this round) are much easier to forget.

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 3:16 pm

Per Mark Rosewater, every set gets "three and a half" unique named mechanics. 2 mechanics if they're complex, or 3 mechanics if they're light.

In practice, that isn't quite true. Current track record is:

Guilds of Ravnica: 5
Core 2019: 0
Dominaria: 3
Rivals of Ixalan: 5
Ixalan: 4
Hour of Devastation: 5
Amonkhet: 4
Aether Revolt: 5
Kaladesh: 4

The "three and a half" rule seems more targeted at the future than a description of the past.

Neurosis · Post by **Neurosis** » Wed Nov 28, 2018 3:26 pm

Whipstitch wrote:I like how his argument is basically that you can have infinite space because everyone is going to netdeck super hard while the casuals eat shit.

roflmao

Anyway we need to narrow down the question the OP is asking here, I think. Is the question "How many cards can be in play" (so, for the most part, permanents on the battlefield but yes as mentioned the graveyard too and in some cases even exiled cards might be relevant (for instance towards tallying the power of a Crackling Drake)) "before a player can no longer keep track of them PERFECTLY?" or is it "How many cards can be in play before a player can no longer keep track of them AT ALL/well enough to continue playing the game intelligently?"

Side Note: I hate that Double Strike is an Evergreen.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed Nov 28, 2018 8:09 pm

It's both as if you have 10 cards that use well known evergreen keywords it's fine.

But 3 cards with unique abilities probably gonna take some glancing back and forth.

Pedantic · Post by **Pedantic** » Wed Nov 28, 2018 9:01 pm

I think a lot of this tension can be eased if you just allowing simple retconning. Netrunner's tournament guidelines specifically allow you to roll anything back, up to the point your actions reveal new information about your opponent's cards that wasn't available from the previous board state (within a reasonable amount of play time).

Notably, this allows you to provide information about your board state to your opponent, like playing a run event, realizing you don't have the credits to actually complete the run, and picking the card back up and trying something else for that click.

If some courtesy on that front is a norm and there's reasonable tournament rules that allow retconning back to a reasonable point (say, last card played, or X activated abilities or something if you need an exact cut off) you can have a more complicated board state and let players work through it more organically.

I played in a Keyforge release tournament recently, which has way more exposure to the MtG community and fucking Christ are those people obnoxious. My opponent who made a simple sequencing error, could have achieved exactly the result he wanted if he just reversed his cards thought I was essentially allowing him to cheat when I said it was fine if he adjusted it. And another guy literally whispered everything he did, apparently so I would have to specifically ask to see his cards if I wasn't sure of their effects.

The whole thing was obnoxious. The actual puzzle of playing the game and trying to solve any given situation with the tools you have at hand should be the point. Errors in judgement are one thing, but tiny errors in mechanics should be something everyone can be human about.

Iduno · Post by **Iduno** » Wed Nov 28, 2018 9:44 pm

Pedantic wrote:Errors in judgement are one thing, but tiny errors in mechanics should be something everyone can be human about.

You, of all usernames, would say something like that.

I'd still say 5 cards on the table that actually do something interesting per person. Lands, 0/3 walls, and lightning bolts wouldn't count against the 5 because they aren't on the table and doing something interesting. Cards that can affect the graveyard complicate that, because everything in the graveyard is potentially interesting, and might need to be tracked. And there have to be few enough abilities total that everyone at the table is at least aware of them and how they interact with the game.

And once your non-tournament group codifies or knows the rules for rewinding turns, the game is too damn complicated for you. We just had to tear down and re-do a game of Arkham Horror Card Game because the last mission in Dunwich Horror is too complicated for us.

You're in another dimension, and locations continually show up and disappear. That's interesting and thematic. However, each fucking location of 3-5 has a different ability that might fire from another card, you leaving that location, you staying in that location, the location coming into existance, or you interacting with the location. Also, each location connects to a subset of the total locations, possibly only through other locations that do not currently exist. That's a lot of interaction added to a game where you also need to track what you are doing, what you have in play/want to, what you need to do, and try to optimize turns.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed Nov 28, 2018 10:23 pm

Graveyard stuff really slows things down, as there's always the "lemme check yours" moments

Neurosis · Post by **Neurosis** » Fri Nov 30, 2018 7:48 pm

If some courtesy on that front is a norm and there's reasonable tournament rules that allow retconning back to a reasonable point (say, last card played, or X activated abilities or something if you need an exact cut off) you can have a more complicated board state and let players work through it more organically.

I've never gone to a PPTQ or anything more formal than that but I have played sanctioned Standard tournaments/sanctioned Standard Showdown in a variety of different states, different FLGS, etcetera. I have never encountered a meta where someone was such an asshole that they wouldn't let me take back a mistake I made if I caught it during the same turn before the relevant action had moved on, and likewise I have never not let an opponent take back a mistake they realized they made that turn. Like, I have never tapped two mana to play a two-drop creature in my hand, put down the wrong two mana creature, said "Whoops/oh-fuck, that's not what I meant to cast, can I please take that back" and had someone just flatly say "no". If I did, I don't even know how I'd react. It would probably be a substantial effort of will just to keep from flipping over the fucking table and decking them on the spot.

I guess what I'm saying is, in my experience, some courtesy on that front is a norm.

Netrunner is a much better game than MtG, on almost every level, including morally/ethically. I just wish it had been around when I was a kid so I could have become hopelessly addicted to it the way I'm hopelessly addicted to MtG.